She dated Hank, a big, self-assured fellow with a reputation for being mean to girls. She began to date him because in those late teenage years she had become more aware of her mind and its powers much superior to those of the people around her. She believed that she could control Hank, and in order to do it she had to be herself, smart, confident, superior, and she had to constantly remind Hank of it. In conversation she began to convince him of his own intellectual inferiority and she began to manipulate him in small ways. At first she was hesitant but then, when she observed her successes, she began to rather enjoy dictating to him where they should go, what they should do and how he should address her at certain times, and how to regard her in the company of other teenagers. In the latter part of the relationship, she took immense pleasure in constantly reminding him how much of an honor it should be for him to have a girl of her mind. The dull Hank complied, not because he was easy or grateful or a truly simple-minded person, but because he had only one motive in mind, one purpose in the total relationship for which he was firmly enduring these manipulations. Margot was a virgin, and the slow but crudely clever Hank had it in his mind that she should not be that way very much longer. And so he accepted, with a little pretense of fight, her spurts of self-assured mental superiority, her directions and daily increasing manipulations; and when the time was right for him to become conveniently angry, he did it with relish, beat her just enough to put her in her place, and then made love to her. As a final and absolute assertion of his manliness, he made her crawl naked on the floor of his room, crying and sobbing, placed one huge foot on her neck, pressing her face down, and compelled her to kiss the other. She did it. And in doing so, she forced from her mind all that she had known and all that she had ever expected to know about the dance.

III

ERIC CAME IN THE DOOR and she stood by in her night-gown, the short pink one he had bought her, waiting, her arm raised to the door frame, her breasts obviously firm and growing under the gown. They embraced and there was the sound of sobbing between them, and Eric did not know whether it was Margot’s sound or his own. It did not matter. They clung and swayed together in the dark room and pulled away from each other, from time to time, to kiss, to breathe, to exchange deep, truthful looks into eyes that could scarcely be seen in the little light coming from the bedroom. They did not talk. And at the right moment Eric lifted her up and carried her into the other room.